Film review: “13 Hours”

Best known as the auteur behind crass, cartoonishly
over-the-top action films and feature-length Hasbro commercials, director
Michael Bay takes a stab at “serious” filmmaking with “13 Hours: The Secret
Soldiers of Benghazi.” Adapted by Chuck Hogan from the book by Mitchell Zuckoff, the film dramatizes the 2012 attack on a United
States embassy outpost and CIA base in Benghazi, Libya. Bay and his films have
never been known for their subtlety, and the thought of the director taking on
a subject like Benghazi is enough to make you cringe in anticipation of the
director’s worst impulses (xenophobia, racism, and sexism among them).

Though
relatively restrained for the filmmaker, it’s not surprising that “13 Hours”
finds more success as just another crass, sometimes cartoonishly
over-the-top action flick than as an insightful look into a tragic
international incident.

Bay’s film
follows security contractor Jack Silva (John Krasinski
of “The Office,” adding a soulfulness to his character during the few moments
he’s actually allowed to act) as he reunites with friend and fellow Navy SEAL
Tyrone “Rone” Woods (James Badge Dale) in Libya,
where they’ll be part of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, tasked with providing
protection for US diplomats and intelligence operatives. Moving on to the
supposedly classified location of the CIA base, they join up with the rest of
their team of badasses: Mark “Oz” Geist (Max
Martini), Kris “Tanto” Paronto
(Pablo Schreiber), John “Tig” Tiegen
(Dominic Fumusa) and Dave “Boon” Benton (David Denman).

Bay’s
simplistic characterization assigns only a few distinguishable traits to each
man, and it took me a while to tell them apart (what can I say: apparently
beefy, bearded white men all look the same to me). On the night of September 11,
a large group of heavily-armed militants storm the poorly guarded compound
where visiting ambassador Chris Stevens (Matt Letscher)
is residing. With no other forces in the area, the GRS team are forced to watch
the attack from their station a mile down the road, until taking it upon
themselves to intervene, against their commanding officers’ orders.

The majority
of “13 Hours” and its 144-minute running time is devoted almost exclusively to
the siege. For better and for worse, Bay’s instincts as a commercial filmmaker
are as strong as ever, and the action is brutally intense. Bay’s staging has
always been chaotic, and for once it’s appropriate, the men are never sure who
is friend and who is foe, and Bay gets plenty of tension out of the indecisive
beats that follow the radioed question, “Are we expecting friendlies?” This is
Bay’s most visually coherent film, most likely a credit to director of
photography Dion Beebe, whose work with director Michael Mann in “Collateral”
and “Miami Vice” has pushed the boundaries of digital photography. Beebe’s
overly-saturated, often handheld camerawork at times makes abstract art of the combat
sequences.

Bay’s
assurances that he’s left politics out entirely are a bit overstated, (the
situation turned into a conservative rallying cry against the Obama
administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — though neither are
ever mentioned by name in the movie), still the majority of the finger-pointing
is restricted to the broader bureaucratic failings of the government. These
missteps are personified by the team’s officious commanding officer (David Costabile), who keep our heroes from moving in earlier and
potentially saving lives. For the most part, the film seeks only to honor the
heroism of the brave men on the ground, though the tribute comes at the expense
of all others: the sole Libyan character of even minor depth is a translator
(Iranian actor Peyman Moaadi),
while the only woman of note is a lobbyist, who gets to be the recipient of
barked orders like “I need your eyes and ears but not your mouth!”

Bay makes
some late-film attempts at even-handedness, ending the action by showing the
countless bodies of dead Libyan insurgents and the women who mourn over their
corpses. It’s mostly too little, too late, but it’s more nuanced than one might
expect from the director who distilled the events at Pearl Harbor into a love
triangle (Bay does recycle that film’s memorable, though tactless, shot from
the POV of a falling bomb). If it can be argued that “13 Hours” is making any
point at all, it seems to be a message of non-involvement, put into words by
Silva as he ruefully wonders if, should he die in combat, his children will
recall that “he died in a place he didn’t need to be, in a battle he didn’t
understand, in a country that meant nothing to him.”

This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2016.